A Thing about Sight

Maya, the jumping spider had a problem with seeing too much. The ultraviolet showed her things other spiders couldn't see, which sounds useful but mostly meant she knew when bad things were coming and couldn't do anything about them. Like how she watched the tree dying for weeks before the others noticed. Like how she saw the pattern of decay spreading through the bark in colors that didn't exist, beautiful in a way that meant death.

The ghost spider, Elena, ate three of Maya's sisters in the spring. This was before they became something like friends, back when eating other spiders was just what ghost spiders did. Maya watched it happen because she couldn't stop watching things. Elena's hunting technique was beautiful too, in ultraviolet.

When the cedar fever hit, it killed all the moths. The orb weavers started building webs closer and closer together, catching nothing, eating their own silk for protein until some of them forgot how to make sticky silk at all. Their webs became just shapes in the air, architectural memories of what webs used to be.

The wolf spider who carried his babies stopped counting how many disappeared each night. "It's better not to know," he said, but Maya could see the empty spaces on his back in ultraviolet, glowing like holes in the world.

The tree kept dying. Not all at once – trees don't die like spiders do. They die in patches and pieces, slow enough to watch but too fast to stop. The bark by the house turned toxic first. Three colonies of Dusty Sisters disappeared overnight, their webs left hanging like empty streets. Nobody talked about it. The survivors built new webs and pretended not to notice the silence.

When the storm came, it wasn't even the worst storm that summer. Just the wrong storm at the wrong time. The branch that fell had been dead for weeks – Maya had seen it glowing with rot. It took out the entire middle section of the tree's spider society. Elena saved four babies from falling webs and ate two of them later that night when no food came. "Saved them from a worse death," she said, not looking at Maya. "Sometimes that's what mercy looks like."

Some spiders moved to the house. The ones who came back said the walls were too smooth to grip, the air too dry to breathe. The ones who didn't come back – nobody knew. The house might have eaten them. Houses do that sometimes.

The wolf spider's last baby learned to hunt by watching the ghost spider instead of her father. She got very good at it. The wolf spider pretended not to notice, the way parents sometimes do when their children become something they never wanted but needed to be.

Maya's mother died trying to teach her proper hunting techniques. "Pay attention," she said, right before a gecko took her. Maya had been watching the way the sunlight broke through her mother's legs, making patterns she'd never seen before. She kept watching as the gecko's ultraviolet signature bloomed and faded. It was beautiful too, in its way.

The Dusty Sisters who survived split into two groups. The ones who stayed in the dying parts of the tree built huge, complex webs that caught the toxic air itself. They evolved to eat it somehow. Their babies came out wrong, but strong. The ones who moved to the living wood forgot how to build big webs at all, made tiny perfect homes in the bark instead. Both groups thought they'd made the right choice. Both were probably right.

Time passed differently after the tree changed. Days felt longer but meant less. Maya kept watching things. She saw how the tree's death made new colors, how the rot opened spaces where different spiders learned to live. She saw Elena teaching hunting techniques to species that used to be prey, not out of kindness but because something in her had broken just enough to make room for something else.

The wolf spider's daughter became the most efficient hunter in the tree. She never carried babies on her back. Some traditions aren't worth keeping, she said, even if you understand why they existed.

One day, Maya found Elena watching the sunset through a hole in the dying bark. In ultraviolet, the light bent wrong, making patterns that shouldn't exist.

"I still eat other spiders," Elena said. "But I look at them first now. The way you do."

"Does it make it harder?" Maya asked.

"It makes it true," Elena said.

The tree kept dying and not dying. New spiders came, different from the ones before. They built webs in the toxic places, ate the poisoned insects, raised babies that could survive in the wrong air. Maya watched them too. Their ultraviolet signatures were strange, broken in ways that worked.

Sometimes Maya thought about warning them about things she saw coming. But she'd learned that seeing wasn't the same as saving. Sometimes seeing just meant being a witness. Sometimes that was enough.

The gecko still lived in the tree. Maya watched it sometimes, the way its ultraviolet signature moved through the branches like a slow river of light. It was beautiful, the thing that killed her mother. That was true too.

In the end, the tree taught them all something, but not the something they expected. Not about adaptation or survival or working together. Something harder. About how breaking can make space for new things to live. About how some losses just stay lost. About how beauty and death and change are all the same thing, if you look at them right.

Maya kept watching. It was the only thing she was ever really good at. Through all her eyes, even the ones that saw things that didn't exist, she watched the world break and rebuild and break again. It wasn't enough, but it was true.

And sometimes, in the right light, even truth is beautiful.